Top Myths of Popular Psychology | Hacker News Reader

Top Myths of Popular Psychology

skeptic.com

130 pointsJacobAldridge35 comments

10% of the brain is one of my favorites. It was perpetuated by someone selling a book that supposedly taught people how to use the "other" part of their brain ;-) And, it also appeals to people who think with a little trick they can massively expand their mental capacity. Everyone loves to think there is a genius sleeping inside of them. All it takes is a magic trick to wake that genius up.

Self-esteems is a dangerous one. Trying to somehow artificially increase someone's self esteem I think could be dangerous. It could create an emotional and cognitive dissonance, something like: "My parents and teachers tell me I am so awesome, but I know I cannot do things as well as my peers" or "I am supposed to feel awesome even though I scored in the bottom 30% percent on the test" from my own experience I have seen kids get disillusioned with their parents or teachers and basically stop trusting their opinions, or, even worse, the delusion gets maintained all through adulthood. They grow up arrogant, they continue to under-perform professionally or academically, yet they never consider their own lack of skills or smarts as the reason for the failure, somehow they blame it on others or on circumstances.

I always say, "Do you really want to use the parts of your brain that make you empty your bowels and scream obscenities? Or do you want to leave those parts idle most of the time?" It doesn't make much sense, but it makes at least as much sense as aspiring to use 100% of your brain.

Coincidentally, brain scans often show around 10% activation (random google eg. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2009/impaired-brain-act...)

Only a fraction of a CPU is active during a given time period (eg if no floating point arithmetic is needed); and we don't use all the muscles in our body most of the time either. That's a bit different from what the pop-psy authors meant though.

"brain scans" depict no such thing. "10% activation in the brain" is probably a meaningless statement -- the brain is always doing "something" (except when it's dead), and in any case, there's lots of different ways it might be getting "activated" (e.g., learning v.s. doing). That said, it's certainly possible to be mentally lazy, and this would no doubt lead to different patterns of activity than being mentally vigorous.

Usually what these brain scans depict is, more or less, how "different" (brighter usually means larger statistical significance t-values) the oxygen-usage activity of some test state is from the same oxygen-usage activity during some rest state. Google fMRI (or look here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/fMRI).

Sometimes this means "less" activity than at rest state. Sometimes this means only very slightly (but consistently) more. Moreover, parts of the brain that vary considerably from trial to trial, but average out to a negligible difference from rest state, would also be easily ignored. This should give some sense of just how many assumptions and calculations have gone in to the pretty brain heat maps that the media are so fond of.

Lots of good and interesting stuff can be and has been figured out using fMRI. That said, figuring out how the brain works using fMRI is like trying to figure out how an economy works by observing CO2 emissions from space, at a resolution of, say, 10m.

But the false claim is that only 10% of your CPU ever gets used. They're saying you never turn on the floating point circuitry, but you can if you buy this book.

In a untrained person, at maximum effort you can activate about 30% of the fibres in a muscle. Not the same 30% every time obviously, that's just what your nervous system has the power to drive. In a trained athlete that goes up to around 50%. Now that's intriguing; if an untrained person could achieve full activation (say in a moment of dire need) they could more than triple their strength...

> Now that's intriguing; if an untrained person could achieve full activation (say in a moment of dire need) they could more than triple their strength...

That one can and does happen. There are recorded instances of seemingly heroic strength where, for example, parents have lifted a car to rescue a child who was trapped underneath.

My research has led me to believe that only an adrenaline surge can produce this.

The thing to note about this is that it essentially impossible to not seriously hurt yourself when you do this. You will tear the muscles. They are operating at their highest power before the wheels start flying off, and you'll tear a lot of fibers.

That is probably because the fibers are handing off work to each other like a baton race, "I'm pooped, take over for me". You might get triple strength - at the cost of sudden collapse a few seconds later when the whole muscle runs out of resources at once.

Edit: in this context, consider the muscle prostration of a person who has been tazed (which forces total contraction electrochemically).

Yeah, that would happen when the ATP was fully converted - so 5-10 seconds.

t-nation.com reckons it's related to nerve signals rather than individual fibres tiring tho'.

That's called "recruitment". If you start weight training, your effective strength will go up fairly quickly for the first few weeks as your recruitment goes up; then it levels off (and at this point most people give up on training) as further recruitment slows and actual enlargement of the muscle fibers begins.

Myth #2: It’s Better to Express Anger Than to Hold it in

I think this is less binary than the article suggests. In addition to expression and repression of anger, there is also "letting things go." When you can forget about something that made you mad, you get the satisfaction of knowing you didn't let it phase you (arguably better than catharsis) without all the problems associated with revenge and obsession.

I really like this paragraph from http://paulgraham.com/top.html:

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

Exactly this is the middle path of Zen and Buddhism is the path that is in the middle and above the dualistic notions of expression / repression or anger / joy....

[You probably won't believe me but] you misspelled faze http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phase

Ok, that did faze me.

Thanks though, you've saved me countless future misspellings of that word.

I've always wondered why the correct spelling of 'faze' seems to be gradually disappearing, considering that the right spelling is actually easier than the most common misspelling (phase).

For me, while I had often heard and used "faze" in conversation, I seldom saw it in writing. Early on my mind got comfortable with the bogus idea that it shared etymology with "phase", and so I assumed they were spelled the same.

I think it has to do with our tendency to overcorrect spelling rather than use the simpler ones (at least when the native speakers comment here). I believe it's exploited in etymology - i.e. even literally authors made errors in spelling but these are thought to come mostly from trying to be more correct than neccessary

I don't think I have ever heard anybody claim that repressing anger is good; just that it is better than expressing it. Letting things go is the best way to handle most strong emotions, even strong positive emotions can cause you difficulties if you act on them. But repressing anger is better than expressing it, because expressing it strengthens and reinforces both the feeling and the behaviors associated with expressing it.

Personally I find that if someone does something to me it can bother me for years. The worst part about this is that the person has likely long forgotten, so I'm the only one feeling discomfort over it.

My strategy now is to just express my discontent with the person as soon as possible. Then it doesn't bother me anymore because I stated my case. Paul's method might be better if you can pull it off.

>Yet as astronomer George Abell noted, a mosquito sitting on your arm would exert a more powerful gravitational force on your body than would the moon.

No it won't. The moon's gravitational force on you is roughly G * m * 5.68 * 10^5 N[1]. (G is the gravitational constant, m is your mass.) A mosquito weighing 2 mg[1] would have to be within two micrometres of your brain to have that effect[3].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mass+of+the+moon%29+...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28mass%29#...

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2*10^-6+%2F+x^2+%3E%3D+...

I think it is easier to fix the argument (change the mosquito for a dog, or if needed change it for your car) than to fix the preconception that the moon really affect us so much.

Now, if we simply observe the changes that the menstrual cycle inflicts on women's mood, then this is something real and with a correlation (depending on a different phase of the moon for each women), but it is not because of the moon, it is because of hormones.

In every case, the myth is busted.

Myth #6: The Polygraph Test is an Accurate Means of Detecting Lies

On Penn and Teller's "Bullshit" show they did an episode about this. One of the more disturbing things I learned is that, despite internal research that showed no effectiveness whatsoever, Sandia National Laboratories went ahead with the decision to require random polygraph testing. Also, apparently you can use your anal sphincter muscles to outwit a polygraph test.

apparently you can use your anal sphincter muscles to outwit a polygraph test.

I'm interested to learn more about this technique - any links/keywords?

This is a clip from the episode explaining how it works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsoI92BfmqY

Actually polygraph tests kind of work but not for the reasons people think they work. They work only if those administering the polygraph tests manage to convince those taking the test that the polygraph tests work.

Security agencies, when their administer the polygraph, will ask the subject how well they are familiar with how polygraphs work. Sometimes they will drop some polygraph test jargons words into the conversation to see if the subject reacts to them. Knowing the truth about the polygraph test usually renders the polygraph test ineffective. Such subjects usually "fail" the test because of attempt to use "counter-measures".

As for sphincter muscles, the pin in the shoe, some basic breathing tricks -- those are easily detectable by "expert" polygraph administrators.

The danger of polygraph tests is that they actually prevent people who are too honest to pass, but they will let sociopaths or those who lie slightly to pass easier.

I really, relly like the urban myth about polygraphs.

There was this man, and he was not confessing. Thus, creative police officers got a lettuce sieve, attached it with some wires to a copier and put a paper reading "He lied" on the copier.

Given this, they put the sieve on his head and whenever he said something they had a slight doubt about, they pushed the lie detector button and the lie was "detected". Eventually the man confessed.

Its an urban legend, but it illustrates the point quite nicely in my opinion.

There was a scene depicting this in "The Wire". They simply put the suspects hand on the copier surface, he had never seen a copier before, and the lights freaked him out.

I don't know if the show took inspiration from the urban legend or if maybe the legend can be traced back to the show. Either way, I highly recommend the Wire.

Thought proper polygraph tests were not so much designed to detect lies as to detect reactions to information that giveaway the subject's involvement in a crime. For instance say they're asking random control questions about items of clothing, then amidst this they show/describe the exact clothes that the victim wore - an innocent person will be oblivious whereas a guilty suspect might be momentarily startled. There's various approaches but none of them are just 'did you kill this man? Were you really at home watching TV?'

Self-esteem is one of the most useless abstractions I know of. Its currency is tied together with this nonsensical emphasis on "feeling good about yourself" prevalent today. I really would like to know how popular psychology concretely became so enamored with ceaseless optimism as a guiding principle in life. I'm dead serious about this because it's clearly not scientifically discovered nor is it historically enduring (Aristotle lists such optimism as dangerous and medieval Christianity would've listed it as pride). Moreover it presupposes consciousness has some sort of exhaustive mastery over the psyche, such that it can just pull itself up from the bootstraps were it wished. This leads to a lot of bad decisions, dangerous decisions, being made and I genuinely think it would be a contribution to our well-being when we finally throw it out the window.

Economic mobility != Social mobility

Self-esteem is a tricky thing. Doubts, fears and a state of anxiety are linked together and are causing and amplifying each other.

It is not so simple. There could be a genetic predisposition for an anxiety, and doubts and fears (conscious or not) will be the consequence - an attempt to avoid unpleasant state, while there is no reason for it.

Doubts lowers self-esteem, low self-esteem produce doubts and fears, and so on.

I remember in about middle school through high school some part of health class was always devoted to ways one could improve one's self-esteem. I remember that I would resolve to do whatever was suggested (usually some variant of positive self-talk) which invariably failed for me resulting in me feeling like even more of a failure for being unable to improve my self-esteem.

Realizing that fear of failure lowers self esteem and increases the chance to fail is a very strong step.

Fear is just a virus - unwanted process which consuming your oxygen and utilizing your nervous system. Of course, it is here for a purpose, so the trick is to accept it, analyze the situation (why it arisen?) and just stay calm and awake.

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